Rock City Roasters is a 25-worker café and roastery in Rockland, ME, that became a cooperative corporation in 2018. The founder started the business in 1992 and saw in the sale an opportunity to reward workers for their efforts building the business, assurance that the café’s character as a main street community center would continue, and an ongoing revenue stream by financing a portion of the transaction’s loan herself. Workers in the rural Maine region are often tempted to leave for opportunities elsewhere, but the new employee owners of the café are investing for the long term.

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Becoming Employee Owned is an initiative of the Democracy at Work Institute.

Our mission is to expand the worker cooperative model to reach communities most directly affected by social and economic inequality, specifically people of color, recent immigrants, and low-­wage workforces. We are a movement-based think-and-do tank supporting worker cooperatives to grow to a scale that creates meaningful change in the economy.